This is an OC hypothetical question regarding the death of a character. Over the years of playing and crewing I have watched different people approach this in very different ways, and I wonder how the forum community feels.

The situation!
You’re tidying out your car/LARP bag and you find a bag that slipped out of sight for a long time. Inside there is twenty or thirty resources, some coins, a pile of forgotten mana cards, etc. In IC terms these resources were with your sister/mother/dog back home when your character died last year. The group you used to play with has split apart or you were a lone player. There is no-one on field who could have found the items and used them.

What do you do with the resources?
Turn them in to GOD?
‘Find’ them as your current character?
Keep them in a wooden box filled with old character ‘mementos’?

Does your answer change if you find only a throne (ish) worth of stuff? Does it change if you find several hundred thrones worth of stuff?

Obviously this is hypothetical (most people won’t lose large bags of IC resources/cash, because it would be missed), it more concerns whether people feel that having money that you didn’t ‘earn’ as your character is somehow breaking the game.

Only pass them to current members of group if they could reasonably have found them IC (on characters retrieved and unsearched body, in their IC tent). Not if you were storing them in your OOC tent either.

Do not take it as your current character. Regardless of size.

Drop it back with GOD, who will be glad of the returned phys-reps.

If you want mementos of previous characters, sketches, IC paperwork, and trauma cards…

I’d return them to GOD. The year before last I retired a character who had quite a lot of goods in his inventory (half a throne in cash and a season’s worth of crafting materials that I planned to use that downtime but decided to retire the character instead) - it wouldn’t have occurred to me to try to move them forward to my next character.

I can see the appeal in keeping one or two game items OOC as a player to remember the game by. I think I have a vial of Liao from the very first event! The rest of his allowance being long since returned to the game. But it doesn’t belong to another character.

Geoffrey_Willoughby:

Only pass them to current members of group if they could reasonably have found them IC (on characters retrieved and unsearched body, in their IC tent). Not if you were storing them in your OOC tent either.

That’s fair. I think each time Gawain has gone into battle he’s left his leather bag with coin, trade goods etc behind in the group tent and I assume they’d be well used (while dropping the bag back to me OC). Only his potions and emergency mana go onto the field and nothing’s kept OC.

I agree with almost all the above, but not the last sentence of this bit, which I’ve put in bold for emphasis:

Geoffrey_Willoughby:

Only pass them to current members of group if they could reasonably have found them IC (on characters retrieved and unsearched body, in their IC tent). Not if you were storing them in your OOC tent either.

I think if the stuff were in my OOC tent (or misplaced in my OOC house) and my character was generally travelling/living with the other characters of the group, then it’s reasonable to expect that the other characters would find the stuff. So in that case I’d pass it on to current group-members.

Hmm… I think it’s a short step from [these shinies are in my OOC tent] to [these shinies belong to me OOC] to [and so I’m going to hang onto them OOC and pass them to my next character], but maybe that’s just me being paranoid and pessimistic of the RP skills of others. Up to you…

Items do get forgotten at home by players all the time, that is why PD allow for items/coins to be posted to them for downtime use. If we start saying “stuff in OC tents is no longer viable for on field use and can’t be available to the group after the character dies”, then I feel that is a slippery slope to players getting unfairly penalised for being forgetful.

This would also be unfair to groups who can’t afford an IC presence. Where do they leave stuff for their group to find after they die?

This would also be unfair to groups who can’t afford an IC presence. Where do they leave stuff for their group to find after they die?

This is the most critical part, in my view. We should be able to assume that any group at Anvil has a place where they can store there goods when they go through the sentinel gate. For groups without a lot of OC resources, this place may not be represented on the IC field, that’s no reason to penalise those groups.

if the stuff was honestly misplaced at home or in your OOC tent while you went to battle because you didn’t put that pouch on in the morning, but should have been on the field / in an IC bag your family/group would recognise then it’s reasonable to assume your family/group found them after you died and added them to group resources.

If your character retired off site, your whole group were massacred, or it’s been months since you played that character and you’ve got your head round your new one, then just turn them into GOD.

I don’t battle so any character ending would be a deliberate retirement, in which case off to GOD with anything more than a few rings (although I currently try and hand everything over to my group’s pooled resources at the end of each event anyway, which can make for an interesting downtime at player events…) I feel like I find odd coins on the field often enough that it wouldn’t make much of a difference but I can also see what Geoffrey_Willoughby means about the progression of thought which is a very good argument against it.

Slight tangent thought- what about items that blur the ic/oc line, eg:
If I bake cookies and sell them in the field, then die in battle having only sold 1/3, can my new character sell on the rest?
If I’ve amassed a collection of newspapers and books, should I put these away as part of my old character and start building my collection afresh with the new character?

I think most people’s instincts here are correct, but there is of course wiggle room where needed.

Oh @Hellcat cookies wise I think you’d be golden, but the documents/pamphlets collection is a lot more IC work so unless you can “bequeth” them to someone else either in your group or not I think you’d probably need to start again.

I had some fun with this dumping my collection of IC letters and replies on my group recently to do with as they will. Found some fun early pamphlets including the one that the civil service used to give out to visionaries “So you’re going to die and enter the Labyrinth!” .

Oh @Hellcat cookies wise I think you’d be golden, but the documents/pamphlets collection is a lot more IC work so unless you can “bequeth” them to someone else either in your group or not I think you’d probably need to start again.

But what if you’re coming back in as something like a librarian or archivist? Having spoken to the Pledge (for example), it can be hard or sometimes impossible to get hold of back issues, and it seems silly to have to say that my 30-odd year old character has only just started buying newspapers…

This is also true. I think there can be a slight issue with things like this as it can feel a bit like “life begins at Anvil” for characters, rather than all the years they’ve already been living in the Empire. At the same time, “new” characters can’t necessarily come onto the field with everything their players would want to, it is neither possible nor practical. Not sure if there’s really an answer for it, or even if there needs to be, just something I noticed personally when making my character!

I think the original question has been answered by consensus, but since the PD wiki makes no mention of it I just wanted to ask for opinions.

Although I have been LARPing since the first Empire event, it is easy to forget that I actually know very little about the social contract behind LARPing, and the actions of some players can make you think that something is acceptable when it is actually not.

Being able to ask this kind of question is important, so each player can shape the hobby according to the understanding of the masses, rather than the few people you’ve interacted with over a specific point.

Slight tangent thought- what about items that blur the ic/oc line, eg:
If I bake cookies and sell them in the field, then die in battle having only sold 1/3, can my new character sell on the rest?
If I’ve amassed a collection of newspapers and books, should I put these away as part of my old character and start building my collection afresh with the new character?

Spent XP is lost. But unspent XP carries over to a new character. Why shouldn’t unspent coin? Character knowledge should only carry over if it is reasonable. A new character of an experienced player might say, “This is my first time in Anvil but I know a great deal about Empire.” Clearly if the previous character knew secrets IC, the new character doesn’t without good IC reason and the player must now treat those secrets as OC knowledge. But everything else e.g. knowledge of the Senate and its mysterious alliances could carry over, “I have heard of this Danish Senator you mention.”
Without a valid IC will a bourse seat holder’s player loses everything on death. In most cases the money should be IC spoken for, the dead character’s friends or family will profit, here we are discussing the unusual situation of money somehow disconnected from plot (the group is gone etc).
So why can’t a player with a sack of unclaimed coin at home simply adopt that as part of the costume of their new character?
Having any sum of cash is completely reasonable background, so why not use it if you have it?